Here’s a bit of TV Commercial animation I did for the launch of the University of Tasmania’s science events and info website: Ignite Your Imagination

Andrew from Atomic Blender supplied the storyboards, direction and 2D assets which I then modified and animated. Additional assets were built and animated in 3D. One of the nicest things was that I used multiple kinds of animation, and a whole bunch of software.

Made by the talented Mauricio Milne-Jones and myself in 2006 and based on a short story and script by Helen van Rooijen (good on ya Mum!).

The original short story had no dialogue in it and I wanted to keep it that way to reach a wider audience and allow the narrative to come from the actions of the characters. It seemed more elegant that way.

It’s definitely one to relax and watch with a glass of red, weighing in at almost 12 minutes it’s a long short! While it’s not ‘arty’ by any stretch of the imagination it does ask you to put things together a bit.

It did ok at festivals for a long sentimental film that asks the audience to think a bit, if it were a short punchy comedy it would have done much better!

A big thanks to everyone who contributed, Alicia, Duncan, Matt D, Grace, Nando, Nina, the use of facilities at Blue Rocket Productions (and you David G!). Plus some helpful advice from Adam.

For those to whom like to know these things, made using 3DS Max, Lightwave and a bunch of Adobe products!

Oh, and if you see this broadcast on TV in the USA, let me know, I’d love to know who the distributor is so I can kick their backsides!

I can finally post some of the animation done for the Tin Dragon project, an installation with a short film component housed in St. Helens, Tasmania. The project is about the Chinese Tin Miners who came to Tasmania in the 19th Century. The Dragon comes along for the ride.

This animation was a proof of concept which doesn’t appear in the final film. The landscape was a still photo, which I separated out the sky and painted in some more clouds so I could make them move subtly.

The project was developed by Virtual Reality Entertainment Systems and the soundtrack for this clip was created by George Goerss of Sonic Solutions.

Hi, just a quick post with a couple of frames from a test animation of the Chinese Dragon flying over Mt. Cameron in the North of Tasmania. The original photo was taken by Julie Martin who’s also running the project.

I was hoping to add some camera movement to the shot but time restrictions and tight framing of the original photo conspired to make it static except for a bit of camera shake as the dragon flies over. Instead I made sure the Dragon cast shadows on the mountain, a bit more important selling the shot.

I did have time to cut out and paint in some extra sky so I could make the clouds move, which for some reason I found really fun.. go figure. All the preparation work paid off as I turned the shot around in a day, nice.

So, animated in PMG Messiah, rendered in Lightwave and final processing in After Effects. Matte work in Photoshop.

Stay tuned, soon another episode of the adventures of Prehistoric TV Reconstruction Kitteh.

I was going to discuss ZBrush sculpting in this post, but I realised there might be some value in covering a little more about set up and preparing for export.

So I’d exported my base mesh as an obj. file from Lightwave and followed the steps in Steve Warner’s guide here pretty closely, as ZBrush doesn’t follow any of the standard windows conventions for just about any operation!

For the uninitiated, it can be a pretty daunting interface.

Saying that, once you go through the process a couple of times it becomes second nature, and you quickly get into sculpting which is quite intuitive.

ZBrush does all of its work by subdividing the bejingers out of your mesh, so the more detail you want, the more polygons you need to let it use. It has a pretty impressive capacity to deal with millions of polys, and it sets a limit based on your system’s capabilities which is really helpful.(going beyond it results in instability)

Thanks to Bump and Normal mapping when you export your work for rendering the detail can be managed more easily. I’m a big fan of Normal mapping, which gives a serious illusion of depth without needing any additional polygons. I haven’t looked into it too much but the only drawback is the maps aren’t exactly editable, using multiple colours to express depth:

ZBrush allows you to sculpt in non-destructive layers. Just like Photoshop you can turn layers on and off, or use them to try things out without messing stuff up.

The other thing that is nice about this is that you can turn them on and off to export different maps in different ways. So if you plan a little you can make things easier when you return to your output software.

And finally, because the rest of the post has been dry and technical here’s a pretty picture!